The Lie

Should I just kick this off with the good old fashioned "Today I...?" Cause I'm planning on gettin' all deep and shit later but I figure I might lead you into a false sense of complacency first. Ah, fuck it, let's do it.

Today I woke up pretty late because my first class on Tuesdays/Thursdays is not until 1:40 pm. Pretty much nothing eventful happened until I actually went to my first class "Dynamics of Poverty." HEAVY. Our (Liz and Tom are in the class) professor is so fucking unintentionally funny. He's like the human version of a mullet. Somehow he manages to be all business and all party simultaneously. He seems to know his shit though. We did this questionnaire thing to see where the class was at as far as what preconceptions we all had about poverty, and one of the questions was something to the effect of "What race do you think is most poverty stricken?" I felt bad for immediately thinking "black people" lol. And when he asked people to shout their answers out loud I was thinking "noone is gunna say it" and it was in fact the very last ethnicity that anyone shouted out. I'm hoping for more lawls in this class, and I'm also hoping to maybe... I dunno, learn stuff too. Lawl. This is one of my first 300 level classes and it seems like it'll be a good amount of work. Plus I have to do volunteer community service hours as part of the requirements of the class (it's like a social work class.)

Anyway, after that class I ate briefly with Tom and then went to "The Meaning of Life." HEAVY. My professor is the same one who taught my zen class last semester. Pretty cool guy. Professor HOLE. He read this very interesting poem that I really kind of struck me called "Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold. Apparently it is relatively well known in the poetry/literature world:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

I don't really know if Arnold intended for the poem to be simply about sadness, but the way I interpreted it was a bit different. The narrator seems to be talking about a kind of meaninglessness or emptiness, not unrelated to sorrow but not necessarily chained to it. To really go into detail about what I mean, I'll have to elaborate a little more on my own outlook on meaning. My whole life I have been led to believe that there was some kind of ultimate purpose to it. Maybe I hadn't discovered it yet but it was definitely out there. From time to time I thought I had figured it out. For example, the purpose of life is to be a good person, or to be happy, or to make a difference in the world, or simply to procreate the species. All of these have their own merit in the context of human life, but something never quite fit with any of them, and I believe I'm starting to understand why. If the meaning of life is any of the things I just listed, then where did it come from? I mean, if there is some kind of standard for meaning... then where did that standard come from? Other people? God? My Intro to Philosophy professor would call that appealing to authority, and anyone who actually thinks understands that you cannot know something merely from other people telling you. Let alone the fact that I don't even believe in god (and I do firmly believe that no rational person should make decisions based on something that you cannot verifiably prove exists at all), and thus would not take direction from him/her/it. So should I trust myself? But how could I know something without being told by others? I guess the only conclusion I can come to is that the only real "meaning" (I don't even really know how to define that word) that life has, is to continue the species, because that is the only reason that I have ever found that can be logically and scientifically verified. That is why we do what we do and are what we are, solely for the purpose of surviving in order to make little half clones of ourselves. We're genetically directed to do EVERYTHING that we do, because our DNA is everything that we are. It's kind of depressing but its the closest I can come to truth. But even if it is our only purpose, then what does it matter? In 1000 years my memory won't even still be around, nothing that I have done will have mattered. I'm okay with that. I just wish the rest of the world would admit it. Whatever.